No facet of farming is more important to the success of the operation than fertilizing the ground. From the days of hand distribution of fertilizers to the present time, there have been many devices for improvement of spreading techniques, and now there are many machines on the market for this purpose. One early example of a spreader is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,243,996, in which a fan is mounted in a hopper to distribute dry material. Another device, shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,193,297, utilizes curved blades which receive a powdery material and fling it away from the device. Similar mechanisms are shown in U.S. Pat. No. 3,523,648, in conjunction with a garden tractor, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,615,055.
In all the above devices, the particulate material being dispensed is powdered. While powdered lime is the most popular type, conditions often exist where such lime is scattered by the winds. It is frequently desirable to use wet lime because it clings to the soil and is not blown away, and is capable of gradually releasing its nutrients into the soil. From an economic sense wet lime is highly desirable, because it can be produced as a by-product of other processes for less than one-tenth the cost of producing dry lime. It is therefore highly important to develop a mechanism capable of spreading wet lime, and the prior art devices are totally useless for such materials, because they would tend to clog almost at once. Merely placing such material within the hopper, as would be done with dry materials, is unsatisfactory because the material would cake immediately.